Facebook Friend Finder Lunacy

July 15th, 2010

Like this blogger and Facebook member, I recently noticed a new promotion on Facebook for some wacky "new" service - the Facebook Friend Finder.

I didn't try it because frankly I'm tired of Facebook and their shenanigans. I retain my account, but don't plan on really doing anything more with it, other than to read up on my friend's activities who have yet to start their own blog or website to share their thoughts and activities.

Turns out this "new" service isn't entirely new (though it may use some new matching algorithm), Facebook has for quite some time asked for passwords to user's email accounts so they can crawl through their contacts and see if there are any Facebook members present in their contacts to connect them.

I have no clue why anyone would be so reckless as to do something like this! In fact, I'm regretting the use of GMail even, as I have come to believe that GMail is already sharing my contact information, and even the contents or my emails, with third parties, most notably LinkedIn, without my explicit permission. Not cool! I still have a GMail account, and I really need to migrate it to my own servers.